Alternatives to Apache

• lighttpd: http://www.lighttpd.net/

• thttpd: http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/

• Boa: http://www.boa.org

Apache is a portable, secure, extremely flexible web server. Precisely because of that, it is not necessarily the best solution for all scenarios. The servers mentioned here are optimized, lightweight web servers that often perform or scale better than Apache for certain tasks. For example, some popular websites such as Slashdot use Apache running mod_perl to generate content and a different server such as Boa to serve static images files. This is easily accomplished by serving the images from a different domain, such as images.slashdot.org.

Some of the projects also include other popular Apache features, such as URL rewriting and PHP support.